MSI is known for its high-performance air-cooled graphics cards and its cool-running liquid-cooled graphics cards sporting All-In-One solutions. Now it's looking to combine the two with its all-new RTX 4090 Suprim Fuzion, which features a liquid-cooled cooling solution without an external radiator (as reported by Allround-PC). The Frankencard eliminates the tubing and external radiator from the typical liquid-cooled GPU approach, making for a massive 4.5-slot solution.
The RTX 4090 Suprim Fuzion comes with an integrated radiator that's housed underneath the card's massive shroud. The radiator replaces the heatsink that would be installed in a traditional air-cooled graphics card, with the pump, plumbing, and heat-plate underneath providing a liquid-cooled solution. Two massive fans on the top of the shroud push air through the heatsink and out the sides of the card, just like a normal graphics card. The exhaust air coming out of the radiator will also help cool PCB components underneath.
Inside the card, a circular heatspreader can be seen attached to tubing that's obviously connected to the radiator. On the outskirts of the GPU die, several copper heatsinks can be seen placed on important parts of the PCB that need direct cooling, like the GDDR6X chips. MSI probably chose copper over cheaper metals to improve heat dissipation, though it's still a different approach. Usually, all of a board's cooling (including the VRMs) gets handled by a single giant heatsink, but with the radiator in place, MSI apparently decided it was better to break the cooling up into individual heatsinks. How well that all works remains to be seen.
Despite the size and airflow constraints of packing a radiator inside a graphics card, MSI's new Fuzion liquid-cooled GPU purportedly boasts 15% better "performance" compared to traditional air-cooling technology. The card also reportedly comes with "90% shorter pipes compared to traditional liquid cooling designs," which is presumably where it gets the vast majority of its performance improvement.
This card won't be for everyone, as it's nearly five slots thick and undoubtedly weighs a metric ton thanks to the liquid and built-in radiator. However, if you like big graphics cards and have the room in your case, it's advantageous from a packaging standpoint. The card retains all the advantages of an air-cooled card in the fact that it doesn't require extra case compatibility for an external radiator and fans, and it offers a much cleaner design with no tubes sticking out of the side like you'd see with regular AIO cooled graphics cards.
Beyond the cooler itself, MSI has also made some changes to the shroud design to separate itself from the pack. Most notably, the RTX 4090 Suprim Fuzion is the first dual-fan Suprim model ever made — all other models come with three fans (unless you only want to count the dual-fan radiator on the 4090 Suprim X Liquid, maybe, but then there's a third fan on the card itself). There's also a massive Suprim logo on the side thanks to the card's chunky girth.
What's not clear is how this new Suprim Fuzion will compare with other 4090 cards when it comes to raw performance. Liquid-cooled cards often run cooler, but that doesn't normally translate into major performance improvements. In fact, the aforementioned 4090 Suprim X Liquid ended up being slightly slower than the Asus 4090 ROG Strix that we tested, thanks primarily to the higher clocks on the Asus card.
Pricing hasn't been announced, but we fully expect this card to be MSI's most expensive RTX 4090. With the already sky-high prices of the outgoing RTX 4090 — 19 months after launch, it's still mostly selling above the base $1,599 MSRP — we wouldn't be surprised if this card retails for $2,500 or higher, depending on its rarity. Collectors might be enticed by the design, but we'd suggest waiting to see what the Nvidia Blackwell RTX 50-series GPUs bring to the table later this year.
